Revitalization of Nivkh on Sakhalin Ekaterina Gruzdeva and Juha Janhunen 1. CURRENT SOCIOLINGUISTIC SITUATION Nivkh1 is an isolate language of Sakhalin Island and the Amur region of the Russian Federation. The language is traditionally classified as “Paleosiberian” together with a number of other languages of Siberia and the Russian Far East. Nivkh may be divided into five geographically distinct varieties, which may be identified as Amur, West Sakhalin, North Sakhalin, East Sakhalin, and South Sakhalin Nivkh. Amur Nivkh is spoken on the Lower Amur on the continent, while the other varieties are spoken on Sakhalin. South Sakhalin Nivkh was spoken on southern Sakhalin, which was under Japanese administration from 1905 till 1945. After the war, the speakers were evacuated to Japan, where the language has now become extinct. North Sakhalin Nivkh was spoken on the Schmidt Peninsula on northernmost Sakhalin, but in the 1950s its speakers were resettled with those of West Sakhalin Nivkh, leaving only a few fluent North Sakhalin Nivkh speakers today. East Sakhalin Nivkh, also known as Nighvng, is spoken in eastern and central Sakhalin. Sakhalin is separated from the continent by the narrow Tatar Straight. The Nivkh on both sides of the straight have always had close contacts with each other, and the West Sakhalin variety is in many respects close to Amur Nivkh on the continent. Even so, the ethnic and linguistic status of the Nivkh speakers on Sakhalin is somewhat different from those on the continent. The present paper is only concerned with the situation on Sakhalin, which today belongs, together with the Kuril Islands, to the administrative entity of Sakhalin Oblast, with the capital in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. The two main varieties of Nivkh on Sakhalin today are West Sakhalin Nivkh and East Sakhalin Nivkh, with North Sakhalin Nivkh also surviving marginally. Sakhalin is the largest island of Russia, with a modern population of about half a million people. The Nivkh constitute the most ancient and most numerous group of the Indigenous peoples currently present on the island. Traditionally, the Nivkh were fishermen and sea-mammal hunters who lived in small settlements along the seashores and rivers in the northern part of Sakhalin. Being semi-sedentary, the Nivkh migrated regularly between winter and summer camps. Other Indigenous groups on Sakhalin are the reindeer-breeding Uilta (Orok) and Ewenki in the middle part of the island, as well as, historically, the Sakhalin Ainu in the south. Since the second half of the 19th century, as a result of Japanese and Russian colonization, the traditional economic and cultural landscape of Sakhalin has been gradually changing. Economic development and industrial exploitation of the island, followed by massive immigration of non-indigenous population, as well as the political, socioeconomic and cultural impact of the colonizers, has dramatically affected the habitat of the indigenous peoples, leading to the decline of the traditional occupations, cultures and languages (Gruzdeva 2015; 2016). The size of the ethnic Nivkh population has remained relatively stable during the known history of Sakhalin and has only insignificantly changed after the inclusion of the island into the Russian realm in 1875. There are currently about 4,700 Nivkh in Russia, of whom close to 3,000 live on Sakhalin. On the other hand, during the last hundred years the number of the Nivkh speakers has dramatically decreased and 1 Gilyak/ Ghilyak. currently comprises less than 200 persons, half of whom live on Sakhalin. Тhe proportion of Nivkh speakers within the total population is very low, comprising about 5% on Sakhalin, as opposed to almost 100% in the early 20th century. There are no significant differences in this respect between the Nivkh spoken on the continent and on Sakhalin. Proficiency in Nivkh involves a continuum that ranges from fully or almost fully competent speakers of the oldest generation down to semi-proficient speakers and rememberers of the younger generations. The transmission of the Nivkh language from parents to children was interrupted several decades ago as a result of demographic, economic and political changes, including, perhaps most importantly, the relocation of the Nivkh population to a small number of large settlements with a Russian-dominated mixed population, accompanied by the introduction of a system of boarding schools functioning only in the Russian language. At the moment, all ethnic Nivkh have almost completely switched to using the Russian language for all practical purposes, including communication between family members. Even those elderly speakers who are still competent in Nivkh prefer to use Russian in everyday contexts. Nivkh has lost almost all of its functions; it is used only during ceremonies and festivals, as well as, very rarely, as a special means of communication between a few fluent Nivkh speakers. In the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages, Nivkh is listed as a moribund language in imminent danger of disappearing. 2. TRADITIONAL METHODS OF LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE The work on the maintenance of the Nivkh language has been developing along the following three lines: (i) language documentation, (ii) school teaching, (iii) language courses. 2.1. Documentation of Nivkh The documentation of Nivkh began in the late 19th century, with the work of two political exiles, Bronisław Piłsudski (1866–1918) and Lev Shternberg (1861–1927), and was continued during the following hundred years by Russian, European, Japanese and American scholars. Unfortunately, a considerable part of the collected materials, including samples of folklore and mythological texts, is stored in personal and academic archives and remains unpublished. In recent years, documentation has also been conducted by activists working in the Sakhalin Regional museum, located in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, as well as in the Center for Development and Preserving of Traditional Cultures of Indigenous Peoples of the North Kykhkykh (“Swan”), located in Nekrasovka. One of the long-term successful projects led by Kykhkykh is the publication of a monthly Nivkh-Russian newspaper Nivkh Dif (“Nivkh Word”). The newspaper has been published since 1990, has a circulation of 250 copies, and is highly valued by the community. It contains articles mainly in the West Sakhalin dialect, but there are also occasional contributions in the North Sakhalin and East Sakhalin dialects. The newspaper performs not only an informative, but also a symbolic role, demonstrating that the Nivkh language is not yet dormant and may function in various domains, including, in particular, media. Another example of positive involvement in the maintenance of Nivkh cultural and linguistic heritage is the activity of the Nogliki regional library. Since 2006, it has been publishing colourful booklets of Nivkh tales and stories recorded from local speakers and illustrated by Nivkh children. Several books from the collection include CDs with audio recordings. It also has to be mentioned that Vladimir Sangi (born 1935), a professional author of considerable international renown and a native speaker of East Sakhalin Nivkh, is a resident of Nogliki. Sangi publishes regularly literary works, including translations, in his native dialect. The local work done on the documentation of Nivkh is very important especially for the preservation of the language in its written and literary forms. The published books can potentially also be used for teaching Nivkh in various contexts. However, in spite of their colourful appearance, these editions cannot solve the problem of maintaining the oral language, which at the moment represents the biggest challenge in the field of Nivkh language preservation. 2.2. Teaching of Nivkh at school and in the kindergarten Nivkh has a rather long history of being used in school. The first Roman-based Nivkh alphabet for the Amur variety, on the basis of which the first school books and newspapers were produced, was created as early as 1931. The Sakhalin varieties of Nivkh remained without orthography. The main problem faced by the educators at that time were connected with the fact that native children had to cope with learning to read and write two languages in two different scripts, Nivkh in the Roman alphabet and Russian in the Cyrillic script. For that reason, but also because of the political and cultural dominance of Russian, it was decided to create a new Cyrillic alphabet for Nivkh. Such an alphabet was created by Erukhim Kreinovich (1906–1985) as early as 1937, but it remained completely unused, since soon the whole school curriculum switched to using only Russian. In 1979, two new alphabets, one for the Amur and West Sakhalin dialects, and the other for the East Sakhalin dialect, were adopted, and soon afterwards two new textbooks were published. Another series of textbooks appeared in 2008 after the adoption of a new school programme. In 2009–2013 the first multimedia textbooks and several school supplies for the Amur dialect were issued. A practical dictionary prepared by Chuner Taksami (1931–2014), a native Nivkh scholar, was first published in 1983. Even so, there is an obvious lack of contemporary learning materials, especially multimedia ones. At the moment, written Nivkh exists predominantly as a language of myths and tales, with no connection to modern life. The potential offered by the two Nivkh literary languages remains unused for practical purposes. An additional reason for this is that the official alphabets used for writing Nivkh contain many special letters and diacritic symbols, absent in the regular Cyrillic script. There is an obvious need to create an alternative orthography that would be easier to use in the context of modern digital technology (Gruzdeva and Janhunen 2016). Soon after the introduction of the new official alphabets and literary languages, the systematic teaching of the Nivkh language started in two Nivkh schools and three kindergartens in 1981–1982. This activity continues up to the present day, though the proportion of participating children has varied in the course of time.